IT has been more than 25 years since George Peppard chewed on a cigar and uttered the immortal line: “I love it when a plan comes together!”
The A-Team
While Joe Carnahan’s big screen revamp of
The A-Team lacks the low-rent charm of the original, nothing is impossible in this all-guns-blazing adventure for Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (Liam Neeson), Lieutenant Templeton ‘Face’Peck (Bradley Cooper), Captain ‘Howlin Mad’ Murdoch (Sharlto Copley) and Sergeant Bosco ‘B.A.’ Baracus (Quinton Jackson).
Framed for the murder of their good friend General Morrison (Gerald McRaney), the quartet break out of military prison and hijack a plane which is subsequently shot down by military gunships.
The quick-thinking buddies leap into an armoured tank – handily parked in the plane’s hold – just before it explodes and parachute to terra firma at breakneck speed, shooting down the gunships using the tank’s weapons systems.
But hot on their trail are newly demoted Lieutenant Charissa Sosa (Jessica Biel) and tenacious CIA agent Lynch (Patrick Wilson).
The A-Team is preposterous, asking the audience to believe that each member of the squad possesses split-second timing to rescue their friends from almost certain death, while the villains help the cause by delaying executions until the last second as if they are expecting their plans to be thwarted.
Sure enough they are, reaching a crescendo with an overblown final showdown at the docks aboard a ship laden with cargo containers.
Carnahan augments most scenes with flashy special effects and a booming orchestral score from Alan Silvestri that seems to have only one volume setting: deafening.
For die-hard fans, Carnahan affectionately pays tribute to the TV version with cameos from Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz, aka the original Face and Murdoch, after the end credits.